Everybody was inspired by the drawings and the wind tunnels and the race cars - but no one wanted to work with me because I had a reputation for being an aerodynamic dictator!

I learned to ask myself questions like: Why is something made the way it is? Why does a motorcar look like it does? Is it right or wrong? What is an airplane? Why is it shaped like that? Then, later, I became a diver and studied subaquatic life and the streamlining of sharks and manta rays. Any fish is superior to the shapes we humans have invented - and unchanged for 250 million years, imagine!

The earth is round, all the heavenly bodies are round; they all move on round or elliptical orbits. This same image of circular globe-shaped mini worlds orbiting around each other follows us right down to the microcosmos. We are even aroused by round forms in species propagation related eroticism. Why should I join the straying mass who want to make everything angular? I am going to pursue Galileo Galilei's philosophy: my world is also round.

China came from a communist dictatorship of the ugliest kind to become a country which today has a smiling population. Things are getting better and better every day - you can feel it, you can touch it over here!

It took two years of me telling Canon engineers that a camera is a thing between the human hand and the human eye, so it had to have ergonomics on both sides! They got the message, and we did it, and overnight it was the camera of the world. Everyone - Nikon, Yashica, Sony - all copied Colani.

The thing is, 75 percent of design today is absolutely outdated. It all has to be redesigned with the materials and knowledge that we now have. We know so much more than what we are doing.

Everybody was inspired by the drawings and the wind tunnels and the race cars - but no one wanted to work with me because I had a reputation for being an aerodynamic dictator!